Two Metres From You

by Heidi Stephens

  Like every room in the cottage, the bedroom smelled like Stilton, but, as far as Gemma knew, Caroline hadn’t been here since a brief visit last summer. Gemma wound the handle on the three skylights, thinking the least she could do was give the place an airing before she moved on in a day or two.

  She wandered from room to room through the house, wrestling open ancient window latches to allow the breeze to move the dust around a bit. In a week it would be April, but already there was some spring warmth in the air and the sky was full of morning birdsong. The front windows overlooked the only road through the village, which clearly went nowhere interesting as there didn’t seem to be any cars going past. Traffic had much reduced in London over the previous week as more people started to work from home, but here it felt like the world had ended. Perhaps it has, thought Gemma. She hadn’t looked at her phone since last night and right now wasn’t entirely sure where she’d left it.

  Aside from the master suite in the loft, there were two more bedrooms and another bathroom on the first floor, then a dining room, lounge and kitchen downstairs. The dining room had a huge open fireplace with an ancient wooden mantelpiece, but there was no grate and the chimney had been boarded up with some kind of polystyrene sheet. The lounge was more promising, which was probably why Gemma had ended up passing out in there last night; a cosy room at the front of the house, with a couple of threadbare sofas, a dusty blue rug and a wood burner laid with paper and sticks. The hearth had a small basket of dry logs and matches, and a poker was propped up against the stonework. Should have slept with that last night, she thought darkly. Could have used it on local intruders.

  The kitchen was at the back of the house, with a natural stone floor, duck-egg-blue cupboards and an enormous, brushed-steel range with seven gas burners and two ovens. Gemma had learned to cook in both of Aunt Laura’s beautiful kitchens but had rarely had the chance at Fraser’s; if they ate in, he liked to take control of the kitchen and make a huge theatrical performance out of it. But since this village was unlikely to have a deli salad bar, Gemma figured she’d have to work out how to use the range. The kitchen window overlooked a rambling, overgrown garden with a stone and timber building at the far end; she couldn’t see if it was part of this property or next door, but resolved to investigate later.

  As Gemma went back up to use the first-floor bathroom, she caught a glimpse of her ravaged face in the mirror above the sink. She looked, unsurprisingly, like a thirty-two-year-old woman who had spent hours ugly-crying before drinking the best part of a litre of red wine and falling asleep under a dog. She was still wearing yesterday’s sweaty running gear, her blond highlights were growing out and her teeth were furry and wine-stained. She vowed to have a shower as soon as she worked out how to turn on the hot water.

  Despite the dust and the pervading smell, West Cottage was undeniably lovely. As far as Gemma knew it had been bought by Caro’s parents as a renovation project after their only daughter left for Leeds University. They had both passed away a couple of years ago, Caro’s mum from breast cancer and her dad eight months later from a long-standing heart condition; Caro had said that what was left of his heart crumbled after her mum died. Caro had rarely visited the cottage since, although she’d left a few pieces of furniture, a cupboard of linens and some kitchen basics for the occasions when she stayed. All other traces of Caro’s family were gone, and Gemma wondered where all their stuff was – certainly not in Caro’s flat. Perhaps it was all stored in the building at the end of the garden.

  What the cottage lacked, however, was food and internet, both of which were aligned in the basics section of Gemma’s hierarchy of needs. In fact, she would probably rather go hungry than sacrifice her online support network, and right now there would be people wondering if she was dead in a ditch. She hunted down her phone, finding it wedged down the back of the sofa with two tiny wine bottles and a few strips of her picnic blanket, which Mabel had clearly snacked on in the night. A fitting metaphor for her wreck of a relationship – once comforting, now in bits.

  Gemma swiped the screen to open her phone, and found several WhatsApp messages from Fraser, all variations on ‘can we talk?’ but in an increasingly wheedling tone. She deleted all his messages, then blocked his number for good measure. The next message was from Caro, sent while Gemma was on the train last night, explaining in detail where the fuse box was and telling her to ask Matthew in a house called The Barn if she needed anything. Well, Matthew had beaten her to it, and seemingly kidnapped her dog. Joe had messaged to say he’d spoken to Caro and could Gemma please confirm the happy news that she’d ‘left that cheating fuckhead for good’. Then there was a message from her sister featuring some kind of funny cat video and two missed calls from her mother, who wouldn’t know anything about Gemma’s situation but called her regularly to give her a coronavirus update according to the Daily Mail.

  Gemma pressed dial on Caro’s number, only to hear the double beep that confirmed there was insufficient signal. She wandered into the kitchen and tried again – the result was the same, repeated in every room of the house including the attic bedroom. Terrific. No signal, no WiFi, stuck in a village in the arse end of nowhere with no car. Gemma couldn’t actually drive, but right now that seemed like a curse from the gods rather than something she had never quite got around to.

  Food and basic hygiene, then. These she could deal with; the rest would have to wait. She found the fuse box above the door in the porch and flicked the main switch to turn on the electricity. The distant hum of the fridge confirmed that this task at least had been a success. Turning on the hot tap in the kitchen, she heard the boiler spark into life and chalked up success number two – she now had hot water. Her skin itched in anticipation of being clean again, so she climbed the stairs to the loft shower, pausing briefly at the linen cupboard to grab a towel. It had the texture of a Weetabix, but it would do – she’d get a full body scrub as part of the package, and at her usual day spa she’d pay fifty quid for that pleasure.

  Soaping her hair vigorously with some shampoo she had tracked down in Caro’s bathroom cabinet, Gemma began to feel more human. She rinsed it through and added a golfball-sized blob of conditioner, raking it through to the ends with her fingers and leaving it to work its magical chemistry for a few minutes. She soaped under her arms and between her legs, allowing the hot water to soothe her skin as she parked images of Fraser going full Magnum P.I. on the Mystery Brunette, focussing instead on the priority tasks for the day. Firstly, find food for her and Mabel, and retrieve her dog from Matthew the Dognapper. Secondly, find somewhere in the village with a phone signal or free WiFi and pick up her emails – there were probably work deadlines she needed to know about. Gemma had two jobs: writing crappy articles for women’s magazines and lifestyle websites, and copywriting for Caro’s ad agency. The former was more fun, but the latter paid more money. Once all the work stuff was dealt with, she needed to make the house liveable, albeit for a very limited time – she’d give herself a couple of days, then start looking for a new flat.

  As always, Gemma felt better for having made a list – despite the madness of the past twelve hours, she was actually an orderly kind of person who thrived on small, achievable goals. As a teenager she developed a list-writing habit – inconsequential day-to-day stuff like ‘make the bed’ or ‘eat breakfast’, scribbled into a desk diary in neon gel pens. The habit had stuck into adulthood – every day began with a list, and anything not completed was carried over to the following day until Gemma couldn’t ignore it any longer. In the early months Fraser had found this charming; later on it was just another thing that seemed to annoy him. Gemma rinsed her hair, trying not to think about how many things on his bedroom to-do list he’d ticked off with the Mystery Brunette. What a shit.

  It was after 10 a.m. by the time Gemma had dressed and run a brush through her wet hair; it was the kind that air-dried pretty forgivingly, and she rarely bothered with a hairdryer unless it was a special occasion that required a
dditional volume. It definitely needed a cut and colour though – perhaps she could find somewhere out here in the sticks in the next day or two, then go back to London with fresh hair and renewed purpose. Somehow she hadn’t got round to booking in recent weeks; it had felt like there were bigger things to worry about than getting her highlights done.

  Gemma jogged down the stairs feeling decidedly better, albeit starving – she hadn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday, unless wine counted as one of the major food groups. She’d lost weight in recent months, having been a comfortably curvy size 14-ish for years. Now Gemma’s jeans felt loose around the waist and her bra had been hooked in an extra notch, but she didn’t feel any sense of joy in this – firstly she firmly believed that nobody should seek self-worth on the bathroom scales, and secondly she was thirty-two, newly single, and squatting in someone else’s house about 90 miles from civilisation. Somehow losing a few pounds didn’t feel much like cause for celebration.

  The stairs brought her back to the dining room, which was still home to the chaos of bags and clothes that had created a landslide from the porch. Gemma took ten minutes to battle the mess, dragging her huge rucksack and bag of toiletries up to the loft bedroom, and moving Mabel’s dog bed next to the dining-room fireplace, where the late-afternoon sun would stream through the windows. She folded the remains of the picnic blanket and tucked it into the bed, then filled the bowl with fresh water and placed it on the hearth. Then she gathered up the empty wine bottles and put them in the recycling bin outside the back door.

  So, food. Was there some kind of village shop, or a bus that would take her to a supermarket? Did they even have buses in this part of the world? Could she call last night’s taxi? Gemma had no idea, and without a working phone she had no means of finding out using normal methods, so she stood outside the front gate in the morning sunshine, feeling helplessly out of her depth. While waiting for divine intervention, she looked up at the front of Caro’s house; it had a very pleasing symmetry, like a child’s drawing with four windows and a door, and a chimney at each end. It looked a bit like the cottage in The Holiday, her favourite Christmas film unless you counted Die Hard, which no sensible person did. The front was covered in a Virginia creeper that was just starting to bud, and a rambling rose grew over the porch. In a couple of months it would look like a cottage from a chocolate box, or one of the jigsaws that had gathered dust in quiet corners of Aunt Laura’s care home. Perhaps Jude Law lived next door, or perhaps it was just angry pensioners and curtain-twitching locals.

  A stone wall separated the tiny, overgrown front garden from the road, with a small wooden gate in the middle, painted white. On the left of the gatepost, a mailbox had been attached to the wall, presumably because the porch had no letterbox. She opened the flap, but it was empty – no doubt all of Caro’s mail was redirected to her house in London. Gemma looked back at the porch, clearly a later addition to a cottage that Gemma now knew was just over 200 years old, as there was a carved datestone between the upstairs windows that read 1815. The same year that Jane Austen’s Emma was published, Gemma mused; she was the least favourite of all Austen’s heroines, being nothing more than a meddling, self-satisfied busybody who definitely didn’t deserve Mr Knightley.

  ‘Are you lost? Can I help?’ Gemma was jolted from her literary reverie by an elderly woman with a red canvas shopping trolley. She was mildly stooped, wearing a cardigan over a floral polyester dress paired with tan tights and brown lace-up shoes. Her hair was set in a perfect white halo, like a gossamer motorbike helmet.

  ‘I’m sorry, no. I’m not lost,’ blustered Gemma. ‘I’m staying here for a few days, but I need to get some food and I don’t have a car. Is there a shop nearby?’

  The woman ignored Gemma’s question, her beady eyes taking in the damp hair and the crumpled clothes. ‘I’m Margaret. Don’t stand too close, we’re all supposed to be social distancing. Are you a friend of Caroline’s? Or a relative? You don’t look like a relative, she’s much darker than you. Her mother was very dark, of course, but her father was Irish, I think. It’s a lovely house, shame to see it empty. I’ve told Caroline to sell it, it needs a family. But she won’t listen. Just like her mother. Are you staying long? I hope you haven’t brought the virus.’

  Gemma didn’t know what to say. She just wanted some coffee and the component parts of a bacon sandwich. Why was this woman still talking? It was all too confusing, and she suddenly felt like lying down in the road and waiting for crows to claim her broken body.

  The fatigue must have shown on Gemma’s face, as Margaret decided to take pity on her, at least for now. ‘There’s a shop, ten-minute walk down there, other end of the village. In the lane by the church. Closes at one on Mondays.’ Margaret gave Gemma a final top-to-toe sweep that she felt in the marrow of her bones, then shuffled off with her trolley towards a clutch of modern bungalows a little further along the road.

  Gemma picked out the crenellations of the Norman church tower in the distance, and started to walk. She stopped, remembering that Mabel still hadn’t been returned by Dognapper Matthew, so she unearthed a notebook and pencil from her handbag, scribbled GONE TO SHOP and tore out the page. She propped it in the window of the porch and set off again, then popped back for a couple of shopping bags and her sunglasses. Anything that might help her get this job done without drawing attention to herself was worth a few moments of her time. Clearly this village was full of quite intense people; staying under the radar was definitely the way forward.

  She’d been too busy trying not to puke in the taxi to look at the village as they passed through the previous night, but now she could see that it was gorgeous. West Cottage was now at the far edge of the village, but when it was built it would have stood alone, separated by quarter of a mile or so of fields or woodland. At various points in the twentieth century the gap had been filled, mostly between the sixties and eighties, judging by the style of the houses. But all the modern homes and gardens were neat and well-kept, broken up by occasional stone farmhouses and old cottages like Caro’s. Gemma thought how much Aunt Laura would have loved the tulip-filled gardens and the narrow stone pavements worn smooth over hundreds of years; she was fascinated by local history and would have wanted to know everything about the people who had built and lived in these homes. Gemma walked past a modern primary school with bright red railings, and a café that was closed on Mondays; there were only a handful of people around, pushing babies in prams or unloading shopping from cars. All the schools had closed last Friday, so right now the local kids would be demanding attention from their harried parents, some of whom were probably wondering how long this madness would drag on for.

  Gemma passed an ancient, half-timbered pub called the Black Crow, which was in darkness with its red velvet curtains drawn, and spotted the turning for the church. Just as Margaret had promised, it was on the same lane as a hand-painted hanging sign for the Crowthorpe Village Shop. Her instinctive reaction was the same as the taxi driver the night before, to hurry towards it like it might disappear at any moment, but she forced herself to slow down and breathe. This part of the village had barely altered in hundreds of years, and Gemma’s unexpected arrival wasn’t going to change anything.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  To Do

  Make contact with civilisation

  Buy all the food

  Find dog

  The Crowthorpe Village Shop had found a home in a converted classroom of the old Victorian school, the rest of which was now used as a village hall. It sat on the opposite side of a dusty lane from St Michael’s Church, next to the gates of an imposing rectory with two immaculate rows of sash windows. A wooden noticeboard attached to the church lychgate informed her that parts of the church were thirteenth century, but it was substantially restored in the mid-eighteenth century, which was also when the rectory was built. Another building that wouldn’t look out of place in a Jane Austen novel, thought Gemma. No wonder so many of the men wanted to be vicars.

  Gl
ancing at the rest of the village notices, there was plenty going on but nothing to get the pulse racing – dates and times for toddler playgroup, Youth Club, something called Autumn Club, organised walks around the village and an upcoming spring plant sale in the village hall. It was unlikely any of this would go ahead under the current circumstances, leaving the village more listless and dull than ever.

  The shop entrance was reached via a short flight of stone steps, to which a ramp for pushchairs and wheelchairs had been added. Attached to the wall at the top of the ramp was a chunky metal ring above a metal bowl of water; for leaving your dog outside, Gemma presumed. The idea that you’d tie your dog up outside a shop in 2020 seemed entirely bizarre to Gemma – if she did that in London, Mabel would be a working girl in a suburban puppy farm by sundown.

  She perched on the sunny wall halfway up the ramp and swiped her phone into life. The tiny 4G icon shone like a beacon of hope, so Gemma quickly clicked on her emails before it went away. She deleted half a dozen spam and marketing emails, then scanned the work emails for anything drop-dead urgent. Finding nothing that couldn’t wait a few minutes, she skipped to WhatsApp to message her mother to say she was visiting friends in the countryside for a few days and would call her in a day or two. Same for Joe – I’m at Caro’s cottage, I’m absolutely fine, house has no signal but I’ll try to call you later. To Caro she sent a heartfelt thank you, along with reassurance that the cottage was still standing and she had briefly met Matthew. She decided not to mention his intruder and dognapper status; it sounded overly dramatic and would be a good story to tell over a bottle of wine when she got back home. To her sister she sent a laughing emoji in response to the cat video, then added PS Fraser is a cheating fuckhead, I’ve left him. In countryside with crap signal, will call you soon Gx.